How to Write a Keith Urban Hit

If you walk in to a songwriting session with Keith Urban ready to create a hit song, it’s probably not going to happen.

Urban told People that if a writer walks in and says, “Let’s try to hit song,” he might just walk out.

“I think if someone said that in a writing session, I’d probably leave,” Urban said.

One of his co-writers on “Wasted Time” agreed.

“We got together just to see what would happen,” Greg Wells explained. “We never talked about writing a single, never talked about writing a hit. Let’s just see where the writing takes us. No ego.”

When it came time to put the lyrics down on paper, the writers all shared their experiences as teenagers.

“There’s girls, there’s drinking, there’s cars, there’s smoking stuff sometimes,” Urban said. “There’s just so much shared experience and youth. We thought, well, this has got to be something that will resonate.”

So they may not have walked into that session intending to write a hit song, but, that’s exactly what happened.